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This research tries to reach an understanding of the relationship between youth, land, and livelihoods through an analysis of incidents of land self-provisioning by youth in a former labour reserve. Research was conducted in three villages over a 10-year period following what became known as 'siziphile' land occupations. The research contributes to contemporary debates on the youth employment, youth land struggles and livelihoods. This is done through the conceptual understanding of worker-peasantry dynamics. The fact that nearly all land occupants had abandoned the occupied land 10 years after the occupations attests to the complexity of issues around land and livelihoods in a worker-peasantry context. The conclusion emerging from this research is a contestation over the 'land the economy and economy is land' narrative, and argues that youth land struggles are not necessarily struggles for livelihoods, particularly among worker-peasants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, a group Khoisan activists began occupying state-owned land near Grabouw, South Africa. Knoflokskraal has since attracted thousands of residents against the backdrop of widespread disappointment with land reform, heritage policies, and various forms of socio-economic marginalisation. The common labelling of Knoflokskraal as a “land invasion” overlooks the unique features of this self-styled “reclaim”, not least the agency that its residents embody in asserting a sense of indigenous visual sovereignty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022 among residents and community representatives, we highlight instances of interlocutors refusing to go along with mainstream research practices and conforming to widely held expectations surrounding Khoisan representation, but instead imprinting their presence on the landscape in unique ways. Knoflokskraal offers a rare glimpse into self-representation through land reform beyond the purview of the government. Read through the lens of refusal, this case study also prompts researchers to grapple with broader issues relating to research practices, indigenous agency, and visual sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In Turkey, land reform was subject to fierce debates among different political groups throughout the 1960s. Land occupations and small peasant demonstrations were seen as new forms of struggle to voice demands for land reform. This article explores the gender and class specific effects of global post-war American expansion policies on agrarian change and peasant struggle in the form of land occupations in rural Turkey. Focusing on the Aegean villages of Golluce and Atalan in the late 1960s, it argues that different political organizations imagined villages as laboratories to test their visions of land reform and the occupiers as a homogeneous class regardless of gender-specific claims. In doing so, it highlights the characteristics of rural class struggles and the politics of land reform with reference to social class and gender in Turkey in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the 'double movement' of enclosures and commoning practices that took place in Göllüce village in İzmir in Turkey. This case shows how landlordism gained strength in complicity with the green revolution and how it paved the way for fresh plundering by new agricultural corporations. This process ultimately produced its antithesis, giving way to the occupation of the previously confiscated land by peasants, who took part in one of the largest peasant movements against enclosures to occur in the country. This article deals with the transformation of power relations between social classes by analyzing the changing claims and actions of actors over land property rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When and why did tomas (land occupations) begin? Despite the widespread belief that La Victoria, in 1957, was the first toma in Chile, and even in South America, many scholars affirm that this phenomenon began in the mid-forties. This article, through an analysis of the press and documentary sources, studies the land occupations that were carried out in Santiago, Chile between 1945 and 1957. Our hypothesis is that the toma was invented in the mid-fifties, when land occupations, which were previously realized silently, started to be dis-played in the public space. In this manner they became political statements. This shift in the mobilizations of the pobladores (marginal squatters) can be explained by the political context, as well as by the change in the State's role in relation to housing problems and urban growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land self-provisioning has been a strategy not only for land access for the landless, but also to rebuild or improve livelihoods for people recovering from livelihood shocks. An analysis of siziphile land occupation of an abandoned safari ranch by communal area residents in south-western Lupane District, reveals the limitation and livelihood risks of such occupations. It shows how by extending farming activities into a safari ranch (which was home to a variety of wild life), farmers were exposed to a great threat from wild life and to their livelihoods. Yet, these farmers typically lacked the means to protect their crops from wild animals. They had no means to recover from the loss of what they had invested after elephants destroyed their crops. The paper emphasizes the risk taken by households to farm a former safari ranch and how it worked to further impoverish households as opposed to improving their livelihoods situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Colombia, armed conflict intersected with land politics in complex ways. Throughout conjunctures of guerrilla and paramilitary domination, the moral economies that sustained hierarchical land orders became a terrain of tensions and negotiations. Through an ethnographic approach to participatory mapping in the agrarian region of Montes de María in Colombia's Caribbean, this article analyzes the links between armed conflict, shifting land orders, and the moral economies that informed peasant politics. It exposes the incomplete and complex processes of space-making produced by armed conflict, as well as the ambivalent and shifting character of peasant political strategies in the context of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "settlements" or "land occupations" in Greater Buenos Aires have been the subject of studies and debate since the late 1980s. The characteristics of the occupied areas, the locations and who intervenes in the process from different places have been an important part of the questions the specialists have worked on. However, some relationships between these specificities have barely been researched. The goal of this work is to reconstruct the interpretations of the land occupation process in the metropolis from 1980 to the present day, around the players involved and the specificities of the land; for the purposes of understanding the territories in question. For this, different texts and primary sources were used. As a result, it will be seen that, over time, very specific moments were defined with participation, prominence and construction of different players based on the circumstances, and that this is closely related to the concentration or spread of occupations in well-defined areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Many scholars in South Africa associate urbanization with an ideal typical proletariat whose primary demands revolve around access to land for housing, wage labor and basic services. However, in Cape Town long-term urban residents are occupying land for raising livestock - a quintessential peasant activity. Drawing on research conducted over the course of six years at land occupation sites in Cape Town, this contribution argues that capitalist development has led to the emergence of an ‘urban proletariat with peasant characteristics’ and to a strong latent demand for urban land for agricultural pursuits. These land occupations are reconceptualized as an important part of the current wave of urban struggles dubbed the ‘rebellion of the poor’. The land and agrarian question is, accordingly, acquiring an urban dimension that needs to be brought to the center of our research and debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estudios del Hábitat is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There has been significant debate about the land occupations which occurred from the year 2000 in Zimbabwe, with a key controversy concerning the role of the state and ruling party (or party-state) in the occupations. This controversy, deriving from two grand narratives about the occupations, remains unresolved. A burgeoning literature exists on the Zimbabwean state’s fast-track land reform programme, which arose in the context of the occupations, but this literature is concerned mainly with post-occupation developments on fast-track farms. This article seeks to contribute to resolving the controversy surrounding the party-state and the land occupations by examining the occupations in the Shamva District of Mashonaland Central Province. The fieldwork for our Shamva study focused exclusively on the land occupations (and not on the fast-track farms) and was undertaken in May 2015. We conclude from our Shamva study that involvement by the party-state did not take on an institutionalised form but was of a personalised character entailing interventions by specific party and state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how popular struggles over housing distribution lead to the transformation of the welfare state. In post-apartheid South Africa, municipal governments distribute free, formal housing to recipients registered on waiting lists. But as formally rational distribution fails to keep pace with growing demand, residents begin to organize mass land occupations. Municipalities respond to these land struggles by either organizing repression, making clientelistic exceptions, or providing transitional housing in temporary relocation areas (TRAs). The growth of TRAs – a direct response to land occupations – signals the institution of a new form of housing distribution alongside the old: substantively rational delivery. This argument engages recent work on the rise of new welfare states in the global South, demonstrating the limits of viewing social expenditure in narrowly quantitative terms. Instead, drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town, it interrogates the emergence of qualitatively novel logics of distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papeles de Población is the property of Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Este artigo busca retomar as formas pelas quais a categoria social dos "sem-terra" se associou à ideia de movimento social no Brasil entre as décadas de 1960 e de 1980. Para isso, retoma-se dois contextos de investigação nos quais ela aparece. O primeiro é governo Leonel Brizola, no Rio Grande do Sul, na década de 1960, e o segundo foram as ocupações ocorridas no mesmo Estado, entre 1978 e 1980, e que culminariam na formação do MST. Por meio desses casos procura-se demonstrar a imbricação entre as ações coletivas que envolvem os sem-terra e a atenção estatal que lhes foi atribuída em cada período. Defende-se a hipótese de que a mobilização dos sem-terra como categoria tem por suposto a mobilização do Estado nessas áreas.The article aims to analyze the forms the category "landless" has been linked to the agenda of social movements between the 60's and 80's in Brazil. It explores two distinct contexts in the Southern state of Rio Grande do Sul: the Leonel Brizola's administration from 1959 to 1963 and the land occupations occurred from 1978 to 1980 that led the process of MST (the Landless Workers Movement) formation. The main goal is to demonstrate the relation between those collective actions and the attention the State regarded to it in each period. As a mayor hypothesis it sustains that without the analysis of State mobilization we can not understand the sociological meaning of the landless in Brazil.

In 1988–1989 and again in 2012 Noongar Aboriginal groups occupied high profile riverside sites in close proximity to the centre of Perth, Western Australia. On both occasions they were claiming rights to land from which their ancestors had been removed in the early nineteenth century by British colonial settlers. During a relatively brief period of struggle and interaction between the Indigenous and settler groups following the proclamation of the Swan River Colony in 1829, the Noongar population of what is now the Perth Metropolitan Area were effectively dispossessed of their land. Indeed, from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century Aboriginal people were required to obtain written permits in order to enter the urban area of Perth. In spite of this, the local Noongar population has maintained an ongoing physical, emotional and spiritual connection to their traditional country and, in particular, to certain sites within it. Two of these sites, Goonininup/the Old Swan Brewery, in 1988–1989, and Matagarup/Heirisson Island, in 2012, have been occupied by Noongar groups asserting their rights to this land. This paper will describe and compare both sites of occupation with particular reference to the methods and motivations of the occupiers and the attitudes and responses of the wider metropolitan population to these events. It will also place them in the wider context of ongoing debates over the acknowledgement of Aboriginal claims to and rights over sites of Indigenous significance and of land occupations as a form of protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exchange of information, the mobility of participants of the occupation of lands, as well as alliances and exchanges between camping, settlers, activists and local political authorities are fundamental in the social world of land occupation. Particularly during the process experienced by participants that occupied the land and established a "black canvas camping" organized by the Landless workers Movement (MST). It is through ethnographic survey of the mobilization organized in the extreme south of Bahia, in Brazil, that I analyze the existence of a particular language - sometimes restricted and sometimes socialized- as part of a specific circuit of transmission of information. This circuit is part of the social mechanisms that allow the daily production of a collective language for social demand and social distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historiography of British land occupations has, in the main, concentrated on anti-enclosure protests. In part this is because the Hobsbawmian land invasion has been largely confined to the north-west Highlands and Islands of Scotland, an area that has not always occupied a central place in our studies of rural resistance. And even when the region has come to occupy centre stage the interpretation of these events has often remained mired in older and now much-challenged paradigms. This paper thus begins by returning to the classic land invasion in the context of an exploration of events of protest in the Scottish Highlands but does not dwell long on the much-discussed formal seizure. Instead, the paper will use these and the question ‘when is an occupation not an occupation?’ as point of departure. At times landowners simply ignored the occupation and continued their own utilisation alongside the occupiers. Whilst small in number when compared to the mass of other protests these non-contested occupations tell us much about general processes of resistance evident in the post-1918 Highlands and of the essential fluidity and contingency of such events. Drawing strength from an older ideology and set of tenurial relations, and acting out a very particular set of protest performances that emerge from individual and localised micro-political contexts, the informal occupation of land alters both our understanding of Highland protest and the history of land invasions more generally. In their adaption of the form of the land occupation, crofters and cottars in the north west Highlands and Islands remind us that even the most privatised of shared spaces offer opportunities for subversion and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This open forum argues that the language and discourse of xenophobia is a shared experience among people who are seen and constructed as being from ‘elsewhere’ in four different provinces in South Africa. It suggests that use of xenophobic discourse and language, the precarious nature of living conditions, labour conditions and restricted access to citizenship rights from the State, are experienced by all people who are categorised as ‘migrants’ internally, and those described as ‘foreigners’ or ‘refugees’ by Government officials. What this open forum will also show is that the Pan-Africanism and collective ideas of freedom, struggle and resistance or ‘bonds of solidarity’ among migrant labourers, both from other countries as well as the former Bantustans during the struggles against apartheid, should not be confined to a nostalgic past, but seen as very much present in South Africa today. This solidarity is perhaps not so much about a shared history of struggle against colonialism and apartheid, although this too may be extant, but is rather informed by a shared present where some are seen as citizens with freedom of movement and access to services from the State, while others are excluded. The notion of citizenship, then, becomes refracted, not merely through the making of the new categories of ‘foreigners’ through labour migration, but also through deeply raced and classed discourses which inform who is viewed as a migrant and who is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No segundo semestre de 2000, acompanhei a etapa final de um processo de mobilização para uma ocupação de terras no estado do Rio de Janeiro. Esse processo, organizado pelo MST/RJ, envolveu a realização de reuniões preparatórias, as chamadas reuniões de frente de massa. Por meio da descrição e da análise de algumas dessas reuniões, examino neste artigo como foi o processo de mobilização. Focalizando o ponto de vista dos organizadores, apresento as estratégias adotadas e discuto seus limites, possibilidades e contradições. De um ponto de vista mais amplo, o texto insere-se na discussão sobre a constituição dos movimentos sociais no Brasil. Nesse sentido, aponto para os limites de dois tipos de abordagens: aquelas que reivindicam um caráter espontâneo para a formação dos movimentos sociais, e aquelas que percebem esses processos como novas formas de se reproduzirem antigos modelos da relação patrão-empregados.In the second half of 2000, I accompanied the final phase of a land occupation campaign in Rio de Janeiro state. Organized by the Rio de Janeiro Landless Workers Movement (MST/RJ), this campaign involved a series of preparatory meetings, called mass front meetings. Starting with a description and analysis of some of these meetings, I examine how the campaign process unfolded. Focusing on the viewpoint of the organizers, I present the adopted strategies and discuss their limitations, possibilities and contradictions. From a wider viewpoint, the text looks to contribute to the current debate concerning the formation of social movements in Brazil. To this end, I point out the limitations of two kinds of approach: those which claim social movements form more or less spontaneously, and those which perceive these processes as new forms of reproducing old models of the boss-employee relationship.

Ocupar terras e nelas montar acampamentos é, em nossos dias, a forma apropriada para reivindicar a reforma agrária no Brasil e dela se valem as organizações do mundo rural, como o MST e o movimento sindical. O Estado tem conferido legitimidade à pretensão dos movimentos ao desapropriar as terras ocupadas e redistribuí-las. Esse fato recente na história nacional é examinado a partir de pesquisa realizada em Pernambuco, estado com o maior número de ocupações. O foco é a zona das plantações canavieiras, onde há grande concentração de acampamentos. O artigo inscreve as ocupações na história recente da região, mostra o que contribuiu para que se multiplicassem e analisa suas implicações. Ao final é feita uma digressão sobre a África do Sul, onde as ocupações, tidas pelos movimentos sociais como o procedimento adequado para obter do governo a distribuição de terras, não possuem a mesma magnitude. A comparação permite identificar as condições sociais que no caso brasileiro têm favorecido a institucionalização das ocupações e no caso sul-africano as têm obstaculizado.Invading private lands and setting up encampments has now become the favoured means of pushing for agrarian reform in Brazil, a strategy used by rural organizations such as MST (the Landless Movement) and workers unions. The State has also legitimized these movements' aims to take over occupied lands and re-distribute them. Research conducted in Pernambuco, the state with the highest number of occupations, provides the basis for examining this recent aspect of Brazilian history. The article focuses on the rural zone formed by large-scale sugarcane plantations where many encampments are concentrated and situates the occupations in the context of the region's recent history, revealing the causes behind their multiplication and analyzing their implications. It concludes by turning to South Africa where land invasions - conceived by social movements as the best procedure for obtaining land distribution from the Government - have failed to attain the same magnitude. This comparison allows us to identify the social conditions that have favoured the institutionalization of land occupations in Brazil while hindering them in South Africa.

The struggle for land is interpreted throughout this article as a historical-structural issue intrinsic to the formation processes of the Brazilian territory and development of the capitalist mode of production in the field. Because of that, this article aims to understand the spatial process of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), which occurs through land occupations and encampments in the state of São Paulo in different historical and geographical contexts. The first historical and geographical context corresponds to the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which the MST spatial process occurred through multidimensionamento of spaces of political socialization. The second historical and geographical context concerns the late 1990s and early 2000s, in which there was overlapping of spaces of political socialization. And finally, the third context is the present. We understand from reading literature, the survey data and empirical research that the struggle for land camps became precarious political socialization spaces and / or incomplete, in which socio-spatial relations and, consequently, organizational are sporadic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions regarding Indigenous peoples' rights to land are most often addressed in terms of their struggles for land in rural areas. This article is concerned with Indigenous people's access to land in an urban context, and explores the spatial dimensions involved and negotiated in processes of urbanisation in Peru. In particular, it will focus on the collective occupations of land on the outskirts of urban centres, and relate this to the development of state policies regarding the growth of new urban neighbourhoods. Since the 1940s and 1950s, marginalised people in Peruvian cities have taken part in collective occupations of land for purposes of housing, and creating new urban neighbourhoods where infrastructure is constructed through collective work and efforts. In response to these practices, Peruvian authorities have created different policies and institutions to facilitate the formalisation of land ownership and to coordinate popular organisational efforts. This illustrates how the approach of the state to these practices has often involved the co-optation of the initiatives of local movements into official policies, e.g. by making compulsory the collective construction of infrastructure in these neighbourhoods. The article discusses these collective practices of work in relation to the increasing significance of individual land titles and loans, and explores some of the responses of inhabitants to official policies. It demonstrates how this coexistence leads to what can be seen as the re-creation of a vaguely defined, hybrid space for citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The Brazilian Landless Movement (MST) is widely acknowledged as one of the most organized, dynamic, and influential social movements in Latin America. The MST has increasingly inserted the struggle for land within larger political contestations for broad social change, leading conservatives and leftists alike to describe it as a “first class actor” in Brazilian politics. What explains the move from corporatist struggles for land to broader counter-hegemonic contestations; put differently, how did the MST come to acquire ‘global ambition’? Much of the literature on the MST analyzes its external actions but without explaining what drives these actions. This paper utilizes a Gramscian political ecology approach to comprehend the MST’s political actions and its rise and transformation into a counter-hegemonic political actor. Specifically, I evaluate the development of the MST’s organizational praxis from corporatist struggles for land in the late 1970s to ‘global ambition’ and changing nature–society relations by the early 2000’s. Such an approach brings to light the role of organization building, political education, alliance building, and subaltern agency in propelling the MST’s political mobilizations. In so doing, this paper contributes to the literature on the MST and collective action. This paper also engages with a ‘politics of scale’ since the conquest of geographic scale is critical to understanding the MST’s national growth and political actions. This paper concludes by arguing that the rise and transformation of the MST into a vibrant counter-hegemonic actor in Brazilian politics was a gradual process that matured as it territorialized into a national movement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Lua Nova is the property of CEDEC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of DADOS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The membership of Colombian indigenous organizations in civil society has been under debate for the past decade. Indigenous organizations themselves have held various positions with respect to their place in civil society, at times opting for armed struggle and at other times for alliances with popular organizations negotiating with the state. What this implies is that we must trace changing indigenous discourses over time to understand how the movement has both distanced itself from and moved closer to the middle-class organizations and institutions of civil society. This article looks at changing alignments with civil society by the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) over the past three decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews a provocative but flawed volume of case studies of land occupations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and critically examines the arguments advanced by Moyo and Yeros in their introduction and co-authored chapter on Zimbabwe. The editors’ core proposition is that the agrarian and national questions are linked in the periphery of capitalism because industrial transformation is incomplete, ‘disarticulated’ forms of accumulation predominate and dependent states are unable to exercise true sovereignty. The chief agent of struggles for agrarian reform, and the social base of rural social movements that occupy land as a key tactic, is identified as ‘the semiproletariat’. The political characteristics of these movements are discussed in the introduction, three continent-wide overviews and several case studies. Most chapters tend not to support the editors’ arguments, and sometimes contradict them. These arguments are in any case reductionist and over-schematic. The categories ‘semi-proletariat’ and ‘peasantry’ are often elided, and differences of conditions and trajectories are seldom acknowledged. A tendency to economism vitiates discussion of the politics of land. These problems are also in evidence in the chapter on Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article focuses on the conditions of the possibility of land occupations. To occupy lands and in them to mount camps, made in the last twenty years, the form appropriated is to claim the land reform in Brazil. The Brazilian state has been checking legitimacy to the claim of the movements, while expropriating the occupied farms and redistributing the lands between what they find in the camps. This type of occupation constitutes new fact in Brazilian history. Occurred in the period prior to 1964, like those of Rio Grande do Sul and of the state of Rio de Janeiro, they did not have the same characteristics and amplitude of what they were generalized in the last twenty years, nor they had become the adequate form to demand land dispossession. There were other ways of doing it, especially the mobilization for the change in the Constitution. With the military blow of 1964, it became impossible to promote occupations. The lands so obtained were returned to its owners and militant ones of the organizations of rural workers became target of the police and military repression.

This paper analyses the attempt to create an ‘imagined community’ among members of the MST (Movimento Dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, Movement of Rural Landless Workers ) as a way of maintaining high levels of participation. As one of the most active rural movements in Brazilian history, MST owes much of its success to high levels of involvement among members who have already achieved their initial goal of access to land. Movement leaders and activists encourage participation by creating a community through ideas and practices and distilled into symbols, slogans and ritual. The lived experiences of community differ from the imaginings, however, and in this paper I show how MST members negotiate the movement's expression of community in ways that reflect historical experiences of economy and society. Ultimately, MST's imagined community is effective because the movement has established itself as a successful mediator between the settlers and the Brazilian State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]